Customer Loyalty Measures Success

Sales executives, like Paul Whitaker of the Imperial Sugar Company, normally use conventional metrics – such as unit sales or promotional spending – to measure business success.

And then, there are significant numbers that customers like to cite. Numbers that really put the business in its proper perspective – let’s say, over 90 years through the customer’s eyes.

“The other night, I had dinner with a customer, John Yonover, president of Indiana Sugars,” says Whitaker. “They’re a sugar distributor and process sugar into specialty items.”

“John said to me: ‘My family has been doing business with your company for three generations. That’s 90 years.’”

Customer loyalty and staying power of almost a century aren’t lost on Whitaker, who’s been with Imperial Sugar for only a few years, and now serves as vice president of sales for its consumer, industrial and distribution channels. Such relationships speak to the company’s more than 150-year heritage of strong customer bonds – cultivated in good times and bad – upon which Imperial Sugar is building its business today.

Reflecting on Yonover’s remark, Whitaker notes: “Ed Neville, our vice president of Imperial Sugar’s industrial channel, had called on John’s grandfather. Then, on John’s father – and now on him.”

During the past 16 months, Whitaker’s sales team has seen long-time customers willingly adjust their merchandise on the shelves to continue doing business with Imperial Sugar as the company recovered from a 2008 refinery explosion, which reduced its production capacity by some 60 percent.

The company’s Savannah Sugar Refinery in Port Wentworth, Georgia, just reopened – with its first deliveries going out to customers this month. Today, Whitaker is seeing major grocery chain retailers – which had to turn to other sugar suppliers to fill the gap – now signing up again for future business.

“To bring a new $200-million-dollar plant back on line, and have customers excited you’re returning to do business with them, is really a neat feeling after everything we’ve gone through,” he says.

The refinery’s reopening coincides with Imperial Sugar’s well-planned growth that includes:

• Getting the Port Wentworth facility’s production up to full capacity.
• Rebuilding Imperial Sugar and Dixie Crystals brands with their core Southwest and Southeast customers.
• Regaining the company’s share of private sugar labels – plus winning new private label business with major retailers.

“A lot of the (sales) opportunities we’ve been working on will come to fruition at the same time our capacity returns at the Port Wentworth refinery – as designed,” Whitaker says.

All of this work is timed to put Imperial Sugar in the proverbial and profitable “sweet spot” come this year’s Thanksgiving-through-Christmas holiday season – especially for sales of sugar in five-pound paper bags, a staple product of the business.

Imperial Sugar’s first quarter of fiscal 2010 starts in October. “Our first quarter is where a big portion of sugar is sold,” Whitaker observes. This strategic timing also holds true for selling to industrial customers, whose heaviest baking occurs then.

“A lot of our efforts have been to make sure we are in business, on the shelf, in order to take advantage of the holiday season.” Speaking from experience, Whitaker knows, “If you don’t have your shelf position before the holiday season, you miss the season.”

Imperial Sugar has no intention of missing out – by serving customers well season after season, year after year and generation after generation. Just ask John Yonover of Indiana Sugars.